Maybe it was the silence. He had expected noise, for some reason. The Limiting Factor was tearing through something it called ultraspace with increasing acceleration; the craft's velocity was hurtling towards its maximum with a rapidity which, when displayed in numbers on the wall-screen, numbed Gurgeh's brain. He didn't even know what ultraspace was. Was it the same as hyperspace? At least he had heard of that, even if he didn't know much about it… whatever; for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams.
The ship didn't seem to want to start any conversations, either, which normally wouldn't have bothered Gurgeh, but now did. He left his cabin and went for a walk, going down the narrow, hundred metre-long corridor which led to the waist of the craft. In the bare corridor, hardly a metre wide, and so low he could touch the ceiling without having to stretch, he thought he could hear a very faint hum, coming from all around him. At the end of that passage he turned down another, apparently sloping at an angle of at least thirty degrees, but seemingly level as soon as he stepped (with a moment of dizziness) into it. That corridor ended at an effector blister, where one of the great game-boards had been set up.
The board stretched out in front of him, a swirl of geometric shapes and varying colours; a landscape spreading out over five hundred square metres, with the low pyramid-ranges of stacked, three-dimensional territory increasing even that total. He walked over to the edge of the huge board wondering if he had, after all, taken on too much.
He looked around the old effector blister. The board took up a little more than half the floor space, lying on top of the light foam metal planking the dockyard had installed. Half the volume of the space was beneath Gurgeh's feet; the cross-section of the effector housing was circular, and the planking and board described a diameter across it, more or less flush with the hull of the ship beyond the blister. The housing roof curved, gunmetal dull, arcing twelve metres overhead. Gurgeh dropped under the planking on a float-hatch into the dimly lit bowl under the foam metal floor. The echoing space was even more empty than that above; save for a few hatches and shallow holes on the surface of the bowl, the removal of the mass of weaponry had been accomplished without leaving a trace. Gurgeh remembered Mawhrin-Skel, and wondered how the Limiting Factor felt about having its talons drawn:
"Jernau Gurgeh." He turned as his name was pronounced and saw a cube of skeletal components floating near him.
"Yes?"
"We have now reached our Terminal Aggregation Point and are sustaining a velocity of approximately eight point five kilolights in ultraspace one positive."
"Really?" Gurgeh said. He looked at the half-metre cube and wondered which bits were its eyes.
"Yes," the remote-drone said. "We are due to rendezvous with the GSV Little Rascal in approximately one hundred and two days from now. We are currently receiving instructions from the Little Rascal on how to play Azad, and the ship has instructed me to tell you it will shortly be able to commence playing. When do you wish to start?"
"Well, not right now," Gurgeh said. He touched the float-hatch controls, rising through the floor into the light. The remote-drone drifted up above him. "I want to settle in first," he told it. "I need more theoretical work before I start playing."
"Very well." The drone started to drift away. It stopped. "The ship wishes to advise you that its normal operating mode includes full internal monitoring, removing the need for your terminal. Is this satisfactory, or would you prefer the internal observation systems to be switched off, and to use your terminal to contact the ship?"
"The terminal," Gurgeh said, immediately.
"Internal monitoring has been reduced to emergency-only status."
"Thanks," Gurgeh said.
"You're welcome," the drone said, floating off.
Gurgeh watched it disappear into the corridor, then turned back to look at the vast board, shaking his head once more.
Over the next thirty days, Gurgeh didn't touch a single Azad piece; the whole time was spent learning the theory of the game, studying its history where it was useful for a better understanding of the play, memorising the moves each piece could make, as well as their values, handedness, potential and actual morale-strength, their varied intersecting time/power-curves, and their specific skill harmonics as related to different areas of the boards; he pored over tables and grids setting out the qualities inherent in the suits, numbers, levels and sets of the associated cards and puzzled over the place in the greater play the lesser boards occupied, and how the elemental imagery in the later stages fitted in with the more mechanistic workings of the pieces, boards and die-matching in the earlier rounds, while at the same time trying to find some way of linking in his mind the tactics and strategy of the game as it was usually played, both in its single-game mode one person against another — and in the multiple-game versions, when up to ten contestants might compete in the same match, with all the potential for alliances, intrigue, concerted action, pacts and treachery that such a game-form made possible.
Gurgeh found the days slipping by almost unnoticed. He would sleep only two or three hours each night, and the rest of the time he was in front of the screen, or sometimes standing in the middle of one of the game-boards as the ship talked to him, drew holo diagrams in the air, and moved pieces about. He was glanding the whole time, his bloodstream full of secreted drugs, his brain pickled in their genofixed chemistry as his much-worked maingland — five times the human-basic size it had been in his primitive ancestors — pumped, or instructed other glands to pump, the coded chemicals into his body.
Chamlis sent a couple of messages. Gossip about the Plate, mostly. Mawhrin-Skel had disappeared; Hafflis was talking about changing back to a woman so he could have another child; Hub and the Plate landscapers had set a date for the opening of Tepharne, the latest, farside, Plate to be constructed, which had still been undergoing its weathering when Gurgeh had left. It would be opened to people in a couple of years. Chamlis suspected Yay would not be pleased she hadn't been consulted before the announcement was made. Chamlis wished Gurgeh well, and asked him how he was.
Yay's communication was barely more than a moving-picture postcard. She lay sprawled in a G-web, before a vast screen or a huge observation port showing a blue and red gas-giant planet, and told him she was enjoying her cruise with Shuro and a couple of his friends. She didn't seem entirely sober. She wagged one finger at him, telling him he was bad for leaving so soon and for so long, without waiting until she got back… then she seemed to see somebody outside the terminal's field of view, and closed, saying she'd be in touch later.
Gurgeh told the Limiting Factor to acknowledge the communications, but did not reply directly. The calls left him feeling a little alone but he threw himself back into the game each time, and everything else was washed from his mind but that.
He talked to the ship. It was more approachable than its remote-drone had been; as Worthil had said, it was likeable, but not in any way brilliant, except at Azad. In fact it occurred to Gurgeh that the old warship was getting more out of the game than he was; it had learned it perfectly, and seemed to enjoy teaching him as well as simply glorying in the game itself as a complex and beautiful system. The ship admitted it had never fired its effectors in anger, and that perhaps it was finding something in Azad that it had missed in real fighting.
The Limiting Factor was «Murderer» class General Offensive Unit number 50017, and as such was one of the last built, constructed seven hundred and sixteen years earlier in the closing stages of the Idiran war, when the conflict in space was almost over. In theory the craft had seen active service, but at no point had it ever been in any danger.
After thirty days, Gurgeh started to handle the pieces.
A proportion of Azad game-pieces were biotechs: sculpted artefa
cts of genetically engineered cells which changed character from the moment they were first unwrapped and placed on the board; part vegetable, part animal, they indicated their values and abilities by colour, shape and size. The Limiting Factor claimed the pieces it had produced were indistinguishable from the real things, though Gurgeh thought this was probably a little optimistic.
It was only when he started to try to gauge the pieces, to feel and smell what they were and what they might become — weaker or more powerful, faster or slower, shorter or longer lived — that he realised just how hard the whole game was going to be.
He simply could not work the biotechs out; they were just like lumps of carved, coloured vegetables, and they lay in his hands like dead things. He rubbed them until his hands stained, he sniffed them and stared at them, but once they were on the board they did quite unexpected things; changing to become cannon-fodder when he'd thought they were battleships, altering from the equivalent of philosophical premises stationed well back in his own territories to become observation pieces best suited for the high ground or a front line.
After four days he was in despair, and seriously thinking of demanding to be returned to Chiark, admitting everything to Contact and just hoping they would take pity on him and either keep Mawhrin-Skel on, or keep it silenced. Anything rather than go on with this demoralising, appallingly frustrating charade.
The Limiting Factor suggested he forgot about the biotechs for the moment and concentrated on the subsidiary games, which, if he won them, would give him a degree of choice over the extent to which biotechs had to be used in the following stages. Gurgeh did as the ship suggested, and got on reasonably well, but he still felt depressed and pessimistic, and sometimes he would find that the Limiting Factor had been talking to him for some minutes while he had been thinking about some quite different aspect of the game, and he had to ask the ship to repeat itself.
The days went by, and now and again the ship would suggest Gurgeh handled a biotech, and would advise him which secretions to build up beforehand. It even suggested he take some of the more important pieces into bed with him, so that he would lie asleep, hands clutched or arms cradled round a biotech, as though it was a tiny baby. He always felt rather foolish when he woke up, and he was glad there was nobody there to see him in the morning (but then he wondered if that was true; his experience with Mawhrin-Skel might have made him over-sensitive, but he doubted he would ever be certain again that he wasn't being watched. Perhaps the Limiting Factor was spying on him, perhaps Contact was observing him, evaluating him… but — he decided — he no longer cared if they were or not).
He took every tenth day off, again at the ship's suggestion; he explored the vessel more fully, though there was little enough to see. Gurgeh was used to civilian craft, which could be compared in density and design to ordinary, human-habitable buildings, with comparatively thin walls enclosing large volumes of space, but the warship was more like a single solid chunk of rock or metal; like an asteroid, with only a few small hollowed-out tubes and tiny caves fit for humans to wander about in. He walked along or clambered through or floated up and down what corridors and passageways it did have though, and stood in one of the three nose blisters for a while, gazing at the congealed-looking clutter of still-unremoved machinery and equipment.
The primary effector, surrounded by its associated shield-disruptors, scanners, trackers, illuminators, displacers and secondary weaponry systems, bulked large in the dim light, and looked like some gigantic cone-lensed eyeball encrusted with gnarled metallic growths. The whole, massy assemblage was easily twenty metres in diameter, but the ship told him — he thought with some pride — that when it was all connected up, it could spin and stop the whole installation so fast that to a human it would appear only to flicker momentarily; blink, and you'd miss it.
He inspected the empty hangar in one of the waist blisters; it would eventually house a Contact module which was being converted on the GSV they were on their way to meet. That module would be Gurgeh's home when he arrived on Eä. He'd seen holos of how the interior would look; it was passably spacious, if hardly up to the standards of Ikroh.
He learned more about the Empire itself, its history and politics, philosophy and religion — its beliefs and mores — and its mixtures of sub species and sexes.
It seemed to him to be an unbearably vivid tangle of contradictions; at the same time pathologically violent and lugubriously sentimental — startlingly barbaric and surprisingly sophisticated — fabulously rich and grindingly poor (but also — undeniably — unequivocally fascinating).
And it was true that — as he'd been told — there was one constant in all the numbing variety of Azadian life; the game of Azad permeated every level of society — like a single steady theme nearly buried in a cacophony of noise — and Gurgeh started to see what the drone Worthil had meant when it said Contact suspected it was the game that held the Empire together. Nothing else seemed to.
He swam in the pool most days. The effector housing had been converted to include a holo projector — and the Limiting Factor started out by showing a blue sky and white clouds on the inside surface of the twenty-five metre broad blister — but he grew tired of looking at that and told the ship to produce the view he would see if they were travelling in real space; the adjusted equivalent view as the ship called it.
So he swam beneath the unreal blackness of space and the hard little lightmotes of the slowly moving stars, pulling himself through and diving beneath the gently underlit surface of the warm water like a soft, inverted image of a ship himself.
By about the ninetieth day he felt he was just starting to develop a feel for the biotechs; he could play a limited game against the ship on all the minor boards and one of the major boards, and, when he went to sleep, he spent the whole three hours each night dreaming about people and his life, reliving his childhood and his adolescence and his years since then in a strange mixture of memory and fantasy and unrealised desire. He always meant to write to — or record something for — Chamlis or Yay or any of the other people back at Chiark who'd sent messages, but the time never seemed quite right, and the longer he delayed the harder the task became. Gradually people stopped sending to him, which made Gurgeh feel guilty and relieved at once.
One hundred and one days after leaving Chiark, and well over two thousand light years from the Orbital, the Limiting Factor made its rendezvous with the River class Superlifter Kiss My Ass. The tandemed craft, now enclosed within one ellipsoid field, began to increase their speed to match that of the GSV. This was going to take a few hours, apparently, so Gurgeh went to bed as normal.
The Limiting Factor woke him half-way into his sleep. It switched his cabin screen on.
"What's happening?" Gurgeh said sleepily, just starting to worry. The screen which made up one wall of the cabin was in-holoed, so that it acted like a window. Before he had switched it off and gone to sleep, it had shown the rear end of the Superlifter against the starfield. Now it showed a landscape; a slowly moving panorama of lakes and hills, streams and forests, all seen from directly overhead.
An aircraft flew slowly over the view like a lazy insect.
"I thought you might like to see this," the ship said.
"Where's that?" Gurgeh asked, rubbing his eyes. He didn't understand. He'd thought the whole idea of meeting the Superlifter was so that the GSV which they were due to meet soon didn't have to slow down; the Superlifter was supposed to haul them along even faster so they could catch up with the giant craft. Instead, they must have stopped, over an orbital or a planet, or something even bigger.
"We have now rendezvoused with the GSV Little Rascal," the ship told him.
"Have we? Where is it?" Gurgeh said, swinging his feet out of bed.
"You're looking at its topside rear park."
The view, which must have been magnified earlier, retreated, and Gurgeh realised that he was looking down at a huge craft over which the Limiting Factor was moving slowly. The park seeme
d to be roughly square; he couldn't guess how many kilometres to a side. In the hazy distance forward there was the hint of immense, regular canyons; ribs on that vast surface stepping down to further levels. The whole sweep of air and ground and water was lit from directly above, and he realised that he couldn't even see the Limiting Factor's shadow. He asked a few questions, still staring at the screen.
Although it was only four kilometres in height, the Plate class General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal was fully fifty-three in length, and twenty-two across the beam. The topside rear park covered an area of four hundred square kilometres, and the craft's overall length, from end-to-end of its outermost field, was a little over ninety kilometres. It was ship-construction rather than accommodation biased, so there were only two hundred and fifty million people on it.
In the five hundred days it took the Little Rascal to cross from the main galaxy to the region of the Clouds, Gurgeh gradually learned the game of Azad, and even found sufficient spare time to meet and casually befriend a few people.
These were Contact people. Half of them formed the crew of the GSV itself, there not so much to run the craft — anyone of its triumvirate of Minds was quite capable of doing that — as to manage their own human society on board. And to witness; to study the never-ending torrent of data delivered on new discoveries by distant Contact units and other GSVs; to learn, and be the Culture's human representatives amongst the systems of stars and the systems of sentient societies Contact was there to discover, investigate and — occasionally — change.
The other half was composed of the crews of smaller craft; some were there for recreation and refit stops, others were hitching a ride just as Gurgeh and the Limiting Factor were, some left en route to survey more of the clusters and clumps of stars which existed between the galaxy and the Clouds, while other people were waiting for their vessels to be built, the ships and smaller Systems Vehicles they would one day crew existing only as another number on a list of craft to be built on board at some point in the future.
The Player of Games c-2 Page 12